Staff Picks for Electronic Book Readers!

The Nightside in the one place in the universe that lives outside the influences of both Heaven and Hell. It’s nestled in a pocket universe inside the heart of downtown London. For John Taylor it’s home, and the only thing that could trump his previous epic battles with unseen enemies or the massive throw down with his mother Lilith (the living embodiment of an abstract concept that existed because it could) is his wedding. That’s right, just like the title The Bride Wore Black Leather suggests, the Nightside’s only PI is getting married to the most dangerous and seriously damaged women inside and outside of the Nightside, Suzie Shooter. She would more than likely shoot him in the back, again, if he were to not show at the altar. So it’s really bad timing when Taylor’s new gig as the voice of the Authorities that manage this city, calls on him for a quick job. It would also help if Suzie weren’t trying to collect the bounty on Taylor’s head. Some women…say what you want, she’s dedicated to her job. As we have come to expect from Simon R. Green, he outdoes himself at every turn, calling on the weird and obscure to build his macabre world. The Bride Wore BlackLeather ranks up very high on the list as one of the best in the series. –BEN

So my man Ozzie — good friend and regular Mysterious Galaxy customer — got me started on Simon Morden’s Equations of Life. It’s a thriller, set in a future London where Russian, Japanese, and local gangs duke it out, and the police are powerless bystanders. Life sucks, at least in the marginal areas, so, yes, this is a dystopia, but the people in the novel make up for this by their verve and their general bigheartedness. The main guy is Petrovich, genius Russian physicist with a shady past. The main girl is Sister Madeleine, a nun with a very big gun, who ditches her habit to help Petrovich rescue the other main girl, Sonya, the damsel in distress and daughter of the local Japanese crime lord. Throw in a rogue AI and the scientific discovery of all time, and you’ve got a fast-paced, quick-witted, culturally savvy sf thriller of the highest caliber. Enthusiastically recommended! — DJ

Wow. That’s pretty much the only reasonable reaction to Stephen King’s magnificent 11/22/63. The time-travel novel nominally focuses on an effort to change the future by preventing Lee Harvey Oswald from assassinating JFK, but it’s about so much more, including personal responsibility, the costs (and benefits) of love, the differences between America in 2011 and in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. It includes nods to earlier favorites (including Christine and It), but this one, while offering suspense of the highest order, rejects the supernatural and instead offers an explanation for its events rooted in current theoretical physics. 11/22/63 is a seminal work by an American master at the peak of his powers. Don’t miss it. — JJM

Jim Holden was the XO of a water hauler until his ship got shot to pieces. Now he’s the captain of a shuttle, trying to stay alive long enough to save what’s left of his crew and to find out who killed his ship and his shipmates, and why. Detective Miller is part of the security force tasked with keeping the peace on Ceres, your average spun-up-so’s-there’s-gravity asteroid out in the Belt. He’s been at the job a bit too long and he sucks at politics and he’s a bit dead inside – and way too stubborn to quit when he’s ahead. These are interesting times. The Belters resent Earth and Mars and their taxes, the Martians care for little that doesn’t help to make their red world green, and those who still call Earth their home look up from their gravity well at everyone with quite a bit of haughty disdain. The Solar System is a powder keg in search of a spark and even in space a spark is surprisingly easy to find. Our heroes Holden and Miller are about to have ringside seats to an Armageddon of fire and flesh. Leviathan Wakes is part science fiction, part thriller, part mystery novel, and part horror – a little something for almost everyone who shops in our Galaxy. So you have your sf – it’s in space in the future and there’s lots of awesome future-type stuff – and possible alien stuff too, right? And there’s lots of war and explosions and political machinations, and that’s all quite thrilling, right? And then there’s a detective (think Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, only in space), and that’s obviously the mystery part, right? So where’s the horror, you ask? Well, some evil sons of bitches found something out on one of Saturn’s moons that would make even H.P. Lovecraft a wee bit queasy – and they’re just arrogant and immoral enough to use it. Curious monkeys. Mix it all together and you’ve got on helluva space opera and the fat lady’s nowhere to be seen. (It’s the first of a trilogy.) --PMH